Manchester United still struggling to step out of the Alex Ferguson era

At what point does a football club decide that the time is right to dispense with a manager who has been clinging on due to his legendary status as a player?

Manchester United's 5-0 humiliation, inflicted by their great rivals Liverpool on Sunday, will go down in Premier League folklore as one of the most one-sided contests in history - at least between two genuine giants who have gone blow for blow over the years.

By scoreline, there have been many more sizeable humblings. However, Liverpool were sent off odds-against at Old Trafford and once they went 2-0 up, the result was never in any real doubt. They established a 5-0 lead after 50 minutes and turned the match into an embarrassing no-contest.

It could have been much worse for under-fire Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. Perhaps if Liverpool had not arrived in Manchester a few days after a highly-charged Champions League encounter with Atletico Madrid, they might not have taken their foot off the throttle and chalked up seven, eight or something worse.

Would that have spelled the end for Ole? As it stands, he'll get another chance when the Red Devils head to Spurs on Saturday before a trip to Bergamo to face Atalanta in the Champions League rematch. The Manchester derby comes immediately after and, if Solskjaer survives, it should be only if he has won at least two of those matches and avoided humiliation at the hands of City.

The writing has been on the wall for some time. United's Champions League comeback in the days before the Liverpool disaster was not something to be celebrated. Recovering from a 2-0 deficit against Atalanta, who were missing a number of key players, was another in a long line of false dawns.

Of course, the man to seal a 3-2 victory that night was Cristiano Ronaldo, who has quickly become a walking, rarely sprinting, symbol of a team who are less than the sum of their parts. The Portuguese superstar is a bona fide United legend, one of the best players to have ever laced up a pair of boots, but his much-heralded return was never the answer to United's problems elsewhere on the pitch.

A team packed with attacking talent but lacking the midfield quality to compete with Liverpool, Chelsea or Manchester City, did not need a striker who will turn 37 in little over three months. Regardless, he has been given carte blanche to wander around the pitch waiting for someone to give him the ball - he might score, but his team might be 2-0 down or worse when he does.

How much of Ronaldo's recruitment was down to Solskjaer is hard to know, but we do know that Sir Alex Ferguson had a say in bringing him back to Old Trafford, reportedly calling his former charge to make sure he returned home instead of signing for Manchester City. It's difficult to imagine Solskjaer disagreeing with the move.

Ferguson, a towering figure throughout my formative years watching the Premier League in the 1990s, played a role not only in Ronaldo's return but also in keeping Solskjaer in a job, apparently joining club bigwigs Ed Woodward and Richard Arnold in backing him in the aftermath of the Liverpool defeat.

It's obvious that the Scot still holds significant influence at the club but, eventually, someone has to make a decision and decide that Solskjaer is out of his depth - something which has apparently been obvious to everyone bar the Manchester United hierarchy for some time.

There's no guarantee that any replacement equals immediate success and United's issues are certainly not just confined to their manager. However, as Chelsea found out when they dispensed with Frank Lampard, sometimes the legend needs to go for the club to flourish.

United are existing in the long shadows cast by Ferguson's great teams of the 1990s and 2000s - in which Solskjaer and Ronaldo played prominent roles. If the Red Devils are to compete with the best, they need to forge a new identity, not just on the pitch and in the dugout but perhaps in the boardroom as well.

Stokes's return a welcome one - but only if he's ready

I was fortunate to become invested in the fortunes of the England cricket team at about the time when Nasser Hussain's captaincy was nearing an end, an era which laid the building blocks for Michael Vaughan's great 2005 Ashes-winning team.

Since then, England have toured Australia four times, suffering two 5-0 drubbings either side of a 3-1 triumph built on the measured captaincy of Andrew Strauss and the runs of Alastair Cook. Most recently, they were beaten 4-0 in 2017-18.

An Ashes tour can be the pinnacle of a Test cricketer's career but, if things do not go to plan, it has the potential to be the opposite, particularly in the uncertain world that we now find ourselves in.

That's why Ben Stokes's recent decision to return for England this winter is one which is met with a mix of surprise, excitement and trepidation, given the all-rounder has taken time out to prioritise mental health following the death of his father Ged in December. He also needed time to recover from a second operation on a fractured finger.

At his best, Stokes can be magnificent, starring in the 2019 World Cup final before doing likewise with one of the all-time great Ashes knocks at Headingley a few weeks later - just two in a long list of highlights.

We can only hope that the decision to return to the cauldron of top-level cricket, in one of its most infamous settings no less, was made by him and him alone. England, with their brittle battling line-up and lack of star quality, need him desperately, but not at the expense of his health.

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